Corruption is installed in all the cultures where it works as a taboo. This implies that it is a social habit that is denied as being corruptive but it is considered as a price that has to be paid.
The social conflicts in Brazil are the second predictor that anticipates that the situation of corruption as a taboo is coming to an end. It will demand time as it did in the central countries; but this trend is unavoidable because it is being catalyzed by the global change in business ethics.
Learning about the unicist ontological structure of corruption and its inhibitors will help to understand the problem.
About Corruption
The reach of one’s globalization is defined
by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…
Corruption is defined as any action that does not fit into the rules of a system and therefore weakens it, degrades it or destroys it.
In the social field, corruption is defined as an illegal or illegitimate action that goes against the laws or the spirit of the laws to obtain benefits from the environment.
Corruption can have internal or external causes. When it has internal causes it is triggered by the failure of some of the elements that integrate the system (when it is) in the case of an engineering system or by the fallacy of some of the elements (when it is) in the case of a living being or a social system.
Introduction
This is a synthesis of a research, led by Peter Belohlavek, which began in July 1975 and ended in February 2013 when it was proven that the avoidance of corruption depends on individual behavior and not on the conditions of the environment. If you want to access the complete abstract of this research please contact: n.i.brown@unicist.org
Corruption allows individuals to profit from the environment through illegitimate actions while they disintegrate the system they are part of. It is based on a “parasitarian” complementation that uses value judgments to justify the degradation of the environment individuals do in order to profit from it.
Corruption is an individual and social addiction that is installed in environments where the participants do not have the necessary critical mass to influence the environment.
Corrupt environments need that their dominant ethics is intentions driven, their justice does not cover the needs of equal opportunities and that the private and public actions of individuals are not transparent.
Corruption may occur in any human action field. It can be included in the emotional, economic, social and political aspects of human behavior. The most known aspects deal with economic and power corruption.
The final purpose is to profit from the environment. To obtain this benefit corrupts adopt four types of actions: sabotage, blackmailing, bribing and defrauding. As it is an addiction, corrupts build a parallel reality in which corruption is a natural and accepted behavior.
Psychopathic manipulation and psychopathic leadership are the natural “tools” corrupts use to develop their actions when they deal with non-corrupt participants of an environment.
Corruption is illegal or socially sanctioned in non-corrupt environments. In corrupt environments corruption is a fallacious myth that covers the shared weaknesses of the members. Those who do not accept it are automatically excluded from the groups.
The antidote for corruption, at an individual level, is the critical mass individuals or their actions have to influence the environment.
Social corruption antidotes require the existence of transparency, functional and not intentional ethics and the existence of equality of opportunities for the members.
About Institutional and Social Corruption
Corruption is based on parasitic complementation. This implies that the corrupt elements profit from the environment without delivering any added value. The final goal is to degrade the environment in order to profit.
This degradation transforms the corrupt action into a standard in the environment that has been degraded at the level of the corrupt element. That is why the degrading participant is legitimate after corruption has been installed.
The degradation of the environment is implemented through value judgments. These value judgments are based on exposing the implicit weaknesses of the strengths of the environment as real weaknesses. It has to be considered that any strength has an implicit weakness which needs to exist. If this weakness is eliminated the strength disappears.
Synthesizing, it can be said that corruption degrades the environment where it is being installed using value judgments that have no defense so the corrupt can profit from the environment assuming the role of a parasite. The paradox is that corruption destroys the environment as such and at the end the corruptor needs to change to another environment because it has been killed by implosion.
Levels of Corrupt Actions
Corruption can occur at an emotional, economic, social and political level of human behavior. The description does not refer to any specific aspects but it is applicable to all of them.
There are four basic corrupt actions:
1) Sabotaging
2) Blackmailing
3) Bribing
4) Defrauding
1) Sabotaging
The first level of corruption is the installation of doubt and suspicion in an environment. To do so, corruptors criticize the environment to degrade the value it has.
This generates the need for someone to solve the weaknesses that have been installed and this is the context of corruptors to profit from the environment.
A typical action of this kind is the generation of a perception of the existence of a problem, that in fact does not exist, and benefiting from its solution without needing to make any action.
2) Blackmailing
Corruption scales if the first level does not produce the necessary profits. Blackmailing is an extortion that implies an abuse of the opposition power to make others accept to pay for avoiding the problems that are being generated.
Blackmailers obtain their benefits through active inaction or destruction, whatever is needed to obtain the profit.
Blackmailing is usually part of other legitimate action. This allows blackmailers to have the necessary disguise in order to be accepted. Strikes, rebellions, and oppositions might be legitimate or blackmailing actions.
A typical action of this kind is the threat of exposing the weaknesses of individuals or organizations in a community.
3) Bribing
When the first two actions do not suffice to profit from the environment, then an active action on the environment becomes necessary.
The first active corrupt action is bribing. This implies paying a price to obtain a benefit that exceeds by far the normal benefit the corruptor would have obtained if the bribing action had not taken place.
The prices paid through bribing might cover the emotional or materialistic aspects. Most of the bribing actions are illegal in organized environments. But only in non-corrupt environments they are also illegitimate.
A typical action of this kind is paying a price to obtain a contract from a client that would not have been possible without it, or where the benefits of the contract exceed the benefits that would have been normal.
4) Defrauding
Defrauding is the necessary corrupt act to do when the preceding actions do not allow obtaining the benefits from the environment.
Defrauding is an active illegal action where dishonest actions are made to obtain benefits. Defrauding implies lying to make the counterparts believe that they will be receiving some specific benefit they need.
These actions are illegal and illegitimate in all the environments. They require having the necessary accomplices in order to become possible.
That is why when this level of corruption is installed it works as a contagious virus, because it generates clusters of accomplices who need other accomplices to obtain their benefits.
A typical action of this kind is overpromising where the counterparts expects a benefit they will never receive.
The Social Corruption Inhibitors
Corruption degrades cultures until they become a group of survivors led by stagnant survivors.
This implies that the final stage has been achieved, where cultures become to live in an endless transition of manipulative leaders. At this level, individualism, which is the driver of corruption, prevails over the needs of the culture.
This implies that societies develop their activity as non integrated individuals who seek for survival in a context where the appropriation of value from the environment and the holding of whatever is possible become the cohabitation code.
This naturally generates extreme materialistic behavior compensated by fallacious myths that provide the members a magical recipe to expect that things will change and the culture will become functional.
The morality of intentions prevails over the morality of actions which drives individuals into the survival ethical intelligence. Survival has neither rules nor codes unless people need accomplices to survive.
That is why evolving cultures have a structural corruption inhibitor that hinders that the society enters a massive survival attitude.
The Corruption Inhibitors
Corruption is inhibited when there is a functional ethics, which implies that functionality prevails over intentions.
Justice needs to be focused on ensuring equal opportunities for all and the society needs to be transparent.
Expansive justice implies that individual action is protected by social repair and not only individual repair and there is a social sanction of all actions that are not within the rules (system) of a society.
This is only possible if there is a social transparency of the actions and individuals are identified based on their actions and added value in the society.
Maximal Strategy of Corruption Inhibition
The judiciary system and the existence of a social repair and social sanctions drive the maximal strategy of corruption inhibition.
The purpose of the maximal strategy is to ensure that the context of equal opportunities prevails over individual profiting. This implies that individual profits cannot be produced by taking advantage of others.
Social repair goes beyond “repairing the damages” that have been produced to an individual. It implies restituting the benefits an individual could not obtain because of the actions of other members of the community. This is the starting point of the maximal strategy of corruption inhibition.
The catalyst of the corruption inhibition is the social sanction that is applied to all those who do not respect the codes of the system. A judiciary system can only sanction what the society sanctions. The judiciary system is the administrator of the rules established by the laws that need to be within the accepted behaviors of a culture.
Therefore it has to be considered that social sanction is a significant indicator of the corruption level of a culture. The final goal of the maximal strategy is to provide the necessary equality of opportunities to all the members. Corruption has been inhibited when this is ensured.
Minimum Strategy of Corruption Inhibition
Social transparency is basic in corruption inhibition. When actions are not transparent there is no possibility to avoid the action of corrupt members.
The final goal is that the public behavior, which is the one that deals with the relationship of an individual with the group, be transparent.
The first step is that results need to be transparent. This implies that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth needs to be open information to the community. Corruption is being fostered in all those niches where there is no transparency of results.
Private behavior transparency is the entropy inhibitor of corruption inhibition. This implies that the private actions of individuals have to be ruled by the functional ethics of a group.
Conclusion
Corruption is the most powerful way to degrade a social environment and ensure its involution. When corruption is accepted as a normal behavior, the environment has lost its possibility to adapt to the context it works in.
The inhibition of corruption is part of the immune system of a culture and is what makes its evolution possible. If the corruption inhibition system fails, the society degrades to a survival state where corruption is installed and individual needs prevail over the needs of the culture.
You can access the book on “Introduction to Ethical Intelligence in Business” by Diana Belohlavek at: http://www.unicist.org/deb_ieib.php
Unicist Press Committee
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems.
http://www.unicist.org
Four types of democracy can be conceptually defined:
The invariables discovered were Expansion and Contraction which work as alternatives at an operational level and Security and Freedom that work as trade-offs. The gain of freedom implies losing security and vice-versa.
